Grace To Surrender

    I guess today was just meant to be a deep day. The depth I encountered made me aware of the persistent ache in me to find it. To find the deep that calls unto deep. To move further and further from shores of perceived safety and shallowness and take a step of faith further and further in. I am hungry yet I still cling to things that I should be sacrificing because I feel that they bring me some sense of a life I want to be living but have failed to obtain.

      When God calls someone He bids them come and die before He raises them to life. Honestly I feel like my life is on hold. I thought I told God, “Not my will but Yours be done, You can do whatever You want to do with my life.” I think if I’m honest though I still live with a certain amount of fear that God will ask me to do something I don’t want to. How do you know when you have really, really laid down all your dreams, all your ambitions, all your need for significance and every piece of yourself? God give us dreams then asks us to sacrifice them. I recount the story of Abraham in my head and feel sadness over the years he had to wait for the promise of God to be fulfilled in His life. I feel a stab of pain again as I walk with him up the mountain with his son, knife in hand, to surrender once again to what God was asking of him. He meant to kill his dream and sacrifice it before God. “But God, You were the one who gave me this dream.”

     I know God wants to use me but I also know in His love, God will not contend with an ounce of my own selfish ambition. We are required to trust Him and put our faith in Him. We are required to let go of pain, of dreams, hardship, passion, bitterness and anything we’ve held in your heart and tried in your own ability to fulfill. We have no power in and of ourselves to make the dreams God put in our heart come to pass. It is Him and Him alone that can breathe life into them. I have to trust that there is freedom in letting go. That there is hope for a new life while I kill what God is asking me to surrender.

     Fire falls on sacrifice. Oh that it would fall on me. I don’t want to live another day with mediocre passion.